In this trenchant exposé of Russia’s totalitarian pathology, Kovalev—who was a member of Mikhail Gorbachev’s secretariat and also worked in the foreign affairs ministry under Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin—blames the country’s enduring “slave psychology” for many of its ills, from the time of the czars to the present. The author, whose high-level career took him into the apogee of government power and whose own father was an eminent Soviet diplomat, approaches the unending Russian cycle of tear-down, reaction, revanchism, and stagnation like a social psychologist. In his early job in the late 1980s, Kovalev worked on the “elimination of punitive psychiatry,” which has helped him diagnose Russia’s chronic problems.
second review can be found here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrei-kovalev/russias-dead-end/
Reagan advocated a “Marshall Plan” for Russia after the fall of Communism, he understood that if Russia didn’t quickly recover economically from 70 years of Bolshevism, she would soon fall into her old habits.
Mr Putin is a “mumbling, stammering knock-kneed brow-furrowing...
Lots of very hard choices during this period with no optimum one in sight. Do you tolerate the hard-liners in the interest of stability (given their nuclear arsenal)? Or do you hope for a sweeping change that clears the country's leadership for something more free and damn the consequences? Or do you do what we really did, muddle through and hope for the best, bearing in mind that very little of this process was subject to foreign influence? Personally I'm happy we managed not to blow up the world.
Putin’s not perfect and neither is Trump but both care about their respective nations and are willing to fight for it while limp wristed book writers pontificate about how they’d do it better in theory.
Look at this guy - “it’s all the peoples fault for being into slave psychology” That’s unmitigated BS.
Russia in the 80s was communist and officially atheist. It’s troops occupied half of Europe
Russia today has a flat tax of about 12 percent, according to an article a few years back by Steve Forbes. That’s way lower than the GOP tax bill in Comgress right now!
Christianity is honored in Russia today
And Russia no longer occupied Eastern Europe.
Yet this book says Russia is as bad as when ? it was an atheist communist empire? BS
Thank you for this! Bought it!
They went politically wrong by not allowing their nation to be further broken down into a number of little often resource rich counties under the thumb of those who rule over us here.
Tom Clancy, in his novels, had a lot to say how Russia went wrong.
This article is identical to articles about Russia that the Economist published 15 years ago. There is no new information, no real insight. It’s just propaganda against the current government by people with an agenda and no balance or context. The Economist magazine folks are hard line globalists who hate Trump and want Hilary Clinton style open borders and social liberalism for all nations. The Economist magazine has never cared about the well being of anyone, it simply represents the amoral interests of transnational capital.
This garbage is the one to be thrown into a paper bin before reading.